If you ask the 20-member staff at Home Care Solutions in Ooltewah, they'll tell you how important home health service is, how the people -- the patients -- are the reward.
They say it's a dedicated team effort to provide post-acute care to home-bound patients so that those patients don't have to return to the hospital.
And that Home Care Solutions' 10 percent rate of patients needing to go back to the hospital is the proof in the pudding.
But also, it's great to have one of their own, physical therapist Brent Ashley, highlighted by their parent company, LHC Group.
Ashley recently won LHC Group's "Therapist of the Year" award over a field of more than 1,000 physical therapists in the company.
LHC has 10,000 employees at offices in 29 states. LHC acquired Ooltewah's Home Care Solutions in 2008.
Ashley has been in physical therapy for more than 20 years and has been a licensed physical therapist since 2008.
But this was not Ashley's destination right out of school. He didn't study to go into therapy and didn't imagine he'd wind up working in Ooltewah.
Ashley was a machinist first. He did that job for three years, but something wasn't right.
He wasn't finding personal fulfillment.
So he made a list of three things he wanted in a job: to work with people, to do something for people that they couldn't do for themselves and to do something with a physical element.
Then he found physical therapy.
"I know that's what I'm supposed to do," he said.
Ashley's co-workers brag on him, saying he's a "best of class therapist."
They hear the same stories folks with aging relatives hear about home health hack jobs.
"Home health gets a bad rap," said Shannon Bennett, patient care representative at Home Care Solutions.
Too many home health therapists are there to collect a check. Too many just want to go through the motions and go on to the next stop, say Home Care employees.
Not here, not Ashley and not his three fellow physical therapists at Home Care Solutions.
"Our goal is not to get in the home and stay there," said Shannon Gleaton, director of nursing at Home Care Solutions.
Because the goal is to get patients off home health, "our census goes up and down," said Melisa Rittenberry, regional operations director at LHC Group.
"And we want it to do that," she said.
In the face of one of the biggest healthcare shifts in decades with the roll out of the Affordable Care Act, Home Care officials said the home health industry isn't as dramatically affected as others, though Medicare cuts have made it tougher for some patients to get care.
So Ashley says he tries to educate his patients, his patients' families and help folks get back on their feet, in some cases, literally.
"I'm not in this to win awards," he said.
Contact staff writer Alex Green at agreen@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6480.